Liquid Lenses For Camera Phones

Roland Piquepaille writes "In this article, the Register writes that "camera phones will soon have lenses made from nothing more substantial than a couple of drops of oil and water, but will still be capable of auto focusing, and even zooming in on subjects." The lenses, developed by the French company Varioptic, contain drops of oil and water, acting respectively as conductor and insulator, and sandwiched between two windows. These liquid lenses could replace glass or plastic ones because of several advantages: no moving parts, leading to better reliability; a very small power consumption; very small dimensions (diameter: 8mm; thickness: 2mm); and a very fast response time of 2/100th of a second. You can expect the first camera phones using these liquid lenses as early as Christmas 2005. These lenses might also appear in medical equipment, such as endoscopes, optical networking equipment or surveillance devices. This overview contains other details and references."

Comments

SciFi to Reality

[NardofDoom]

Frank Herbert wrote of oil lenses in Dune: Link

It's pretty cool that this is coming to pass, even if they're not sandwiched between force fields.

Another recent article on liquid lenses

[natural rah]

There is another recent article on this topic here in the latest issue (Dec 2004) of IEEE Spectrum. From this article it looks like this technology will be commercialized within the next 2-3 years.

Re:Humidity, physical contact, etc.

[kaleco]

It is sandwiched between two protective layers. It may be more fragile than conventional lenses, but it should be durable enough to be excellent value. The cost of adding analogue zoom and focus to such a cameraphone (and keeping it small) would otherwise be prohibitive.

Bell Labs talked about this almost two years ago

[malakai]

Tunable Microlens

No idea if they had patents on it. If this French company got there first, these would seem to be very lucrative patents.

As for SciFi being there first, that's hardly an argument we (Geeks) want to see used. If companies can't make money off a technique or concept because a SciFi writer wrote about it abstractly, they will not invest the money needed to create such a technology. We'd have to sit around and wait for some gigantic government initiative like the Space Shuttle to get technology we've long dreamed for. And even then.. it's rarely in a form we can benefit from.

Remeber, its 1% inspiration/ 99% perspiration.

It's gret these SciFi writers inspired our engineers, but the effort that goes in to producing viable products should not remain un-rewarded.